Author: hopeandree

An incident in the garden this week fell under “things we never thought we’d have to teach.”

On Monday, during class, Canyon the dog was furiously digging under the shed and Antonio and Immanuel decided to investigate. They came back to us shouting gleefully that there was a dead skunk. I went to look into this and pulled at the black and white tail, revealing a skunk not only dead, but mummified—completely dried, with its skin, fur, and skeleton intact.

Mass hysteria ensured, along with much poking, prodding and running in circles screaming. Some of the kids were scared, others disgusted, and they were all riveted. To avoid destroying the specimen, we insisted they only look at it, while we talked about what to do. After some conversation, we decided to obtain gloves and proper dissecting tools, and cut it open next week.

That plan did not work. Dissecting a mummy is like cutting leather. With great effort we opened the carcass, and found only dust inside. What remained was to obtain the skeleton, somehow.

I could only think of one way: Boil it. I pulled out the camp stove, the propane and matches. The kids all wanted to light it, so we lit it several times. We dumped the skunk into a large pot used mostly for canning, and set it on to boil.

After an hour the smell was so hideous that I was worried neighbors would call the health board. After lunch inside, two hours later, I took the pot off and removed it to the back of the garden. The smell of boiling skunk was ruining my day. It all seemed like a huge mistake at that point.

When we dumped the carcass on the ground by the compost pile, I was ready to walk away from the whole project. Fortunately, Kannan has a stomach strong enough for the work of fishing the skeleton out of the mushy remains of our “project.” He retrieved the skull, and intact claw, and several bones. The rest of the mess was thrown onto the compost pile.

To this day the skunk skull, and the story of the Skunk Boil, are features of great pride and the subject of storytelling by veteran students. It felt like a heroic undertaking.

The Skunk Boil was an unexpected bonus in our ongoing studies of growth and decomposition, the processes that make soil, and the vibrant microbial worlds within and without us. And it has become part of the philosophical and spiritual reckonings around death that children naturally confront, in widening spirals, throughout childhood–and beyond.

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This is an informal blog with ideas and tips for homeschooling parents, based on my own experience and research into the homeschooling community around Boston, as well as some more philosophical musings on education today.

For today, a bit of my own family’s story:

I have two teen sons who have now been through every type of local schooling found in this area. Thanks to our complex system of school choice, we don’t all end up going to the local elementary school. This, while it helps to equalize our education and integrate the Boston schools, is hard on communities and families. Relationships are fractured and families an grow distant when friends end up in different schools.

We had this experience when my kids were accepted into an excellent charter school for kindergarten. We lived in Jamaica Plain, and the school was in Dorchester. The long commute was daunting, and none of our local friends went to school there. After four years we had a sense of the pros and cons. The schools was passionate about education for the urban poor, but we didn’t belong to that demographic. There were kids with serious discipline problems in every class, and they would eat up much of the teacher’s energy.

But more significantly, I found myself at odds with the teaching philosophy that set fixed goals for such young kids. One of my sons “fell behind” the benchmark for reading at his grade-level. He was tested for every known learning disability, and nothing came up. In the end, he was just a little slow in that area, and didn’t really like to read. The stress of the testing and the labelling was the final straw for that school. And it’s been a problem I’ve reckoned with at every pubic school my sons have attended.

My biggest motivation for creating JP Green School is my sense that we are rushing our kids, submitting them to constant judgement (in the form of tests), and thereby teaching them to dislike learning itself. This isn’t education–this is the opposite of education.

We left that school for a great Montessori school just outside of Boston, and spent 8 happy years there. Montessori taught me much of what I know about child-directed learning, creating an environment of joy, and a community of love and support. I use those principles every day when I teach at JP Green School.

Over time, however, I came to see that much of that environment could be created at much lower cost, within a community of homeschoolers. Our beloved school cost about 20k/year. This is very cheap for a private school, many of which cost twice that! But it’s still an outrageous sum and could easily be almost 1/2 the income of a middle-class family.

I’ll continue the story of my own family later. Right now I’ll just end with my current working budget for a happy homeschooling experience. By my calculations, a family can homeschool a child easily for 8k/year. Of course it can also be done for less, depending on how self-directed the child is, and how much the parents are available. But I’m working from my “optimal scenario”, which is what I devised for my own homeschooler. (More later on that story.)

In this figure I’m assuming 2-3 days/week in a program like JP Green School, Parts and Crafts, or Macomber Center. These free schools are not cheap, but they’re well worth a few thousand a year to give the child and the family a home-base for their experience. Those few days can then be supplemented with a variety of wonderful courses, workshops, and programs all over the city, and also self-guided or community-led study.

In upcoming blogs I’ll feature a few of the local free schools and what they offer.